`MIRACLE BABIES` SURVIVE QUAKE

They spent the first week of their lives buried beneath hundreds of tons of rubble without food or water, and they are doing just fine.

They are four babies who were buried alive just hours after their birth when the Juarez Hospital in central Mexico City collapsed during the first of two killer earthquakes last week.

At least six infants, five girls and a boy, have been pulled from the debris of two hospitals. All were trapped for four to seven days, yet suffered only minor injuries.

Mexican newspapers are calling them ''miracle babies,'' and doctors can only guess at the reasons they survived at all.

''We really don`t know how they survived,'' said Dr. Rolando Cuevas Uribe, a pediatrician treating four infants at the Military Hospital, but a primary reason may be that newborns have a great deal of fluid in their bodies, he said.

''A newborn baby is more water than anything else,'' said Dr. Alys Mae Holden, a Mexico City pediatrician. ''It is really little more than a ball of water.''

She said that a fasting baby with its movements restricted would expend about 50 calories a day, which would represent a fluid loss of 3.2 ounces. The babies weighed an average of just over 5 pounds at birth.

Cuevas said the babies ''were probably asleep most of the time,'' or in a state of semi-hibernation. ''In such a state their respiration would fall off to a minimum, and that would conserve their energy and strength,'' he said.

''I think that is part of the answer, that a fasting baby does not lose much,'' Holden said. ''That`s part. The rest is a miracle.''

In addition, she said, babies require little fluid during the first days of life, and normal babies tend to lose 10 percent of their body weight during their first 10 days. Remarkably, all but one of the buried infants lost exactly the right amount of weight.

Cuevas said another factor contributing to the babies` survival was the layer of special fat beneath the skin of newborns, which probably helped insulate them during the cool, rainy nights and supplied them with calories during the day.

''Their environment would have been something like a womb, I think,''

Holden said, ''something they were obviously used to.''

She and Cuevas said that because the infants had only primitive vision and no sense of being in danger, they were unlikely to suffer any lasting psychological trauma.

On Thursday night, Deputy Interior Minister Fernando Perez Correa told reporters that 1,825 bodies had been recovered from the rubble of the two earthquakes that rocked Mexico on Sept. 19 and 20. That figure was widely disregarded by the media, however, and contrasted sharply with the official report from the Mexico City Police Department, which said 4,722 bodies had been recovered.

All four babies in the Military Hospital are now eating and sleeping normally, and Cuevas predicted that three of the four would suffer no lasting damage. The fourth, known only by her mother`s names, Hernandez Sandoval, has a 95 percent chance of survival, although she suffered severe injuries to her left foot.

Three of the four have lost their mothers; one was found lying on her dead mother`s breast. The mother of the fourth baby is missing and thought to be dead. Two of the fathers survived.

The babies were identified by the hospital wrist bracelets attached after birth.